This website appears quite similar to my website at UIUC, but the information here is maintained. The UIUC site is still up for transition purposes and to host the geneagrapher until I get its situation sorted out. Part of the plan with the geneagrapher is discussed in this post.

If you arrived here via my old page at UIUC, good. If you arrived here via a search engine, even better, and if you found your way here through a link from some other source, I am surprised. Thanks for stopping by.

About Me

Academic Background

In May 2007, I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I specialized in scientific computing and am particularly interested in algorithm and data structure design and development. My dissertation, titled Efficient Setup Algorithms for Parallel Algebraic Multigrid, focused on parallel coarse grid selection algorithms for algebraic multigrid (AMG) and was conducted under the guidance of my advisors Luke Olson and Paul Saylor.

I earned a M.S. in Computer Science at UIUC in 2004 under the guidance of Paul Saylor. My Masters research was influenced heavily by the work I did in my first summer at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Further back, I earned a B.S. in Biological Science and Computer Science at the University of Iowa.

Publications

• D. M. Alber. Modifying CLJP to select grid hierarchies with lower operator complexities and better performance. Numer. Linear Algebra Appl., 13:87-104, 2006.
• D. M. Alber and L. N. Olson. Parallel coarse grid selection. Numer. Linear Algebra Appl., 14:611-643, 2007.
• C. Chang, D. Alber, P. Graf, K. Kim, and M. Seibert. Addressing unknown constants and metabolic
  network behaviors through petascale computing: understanding H₂ production in green algae. J.
  Phys.: Conf. Ser., 78 012011, 2007.
• C. H. Chang, P. Graf, D. M. Alber, K. Kim, G. Murray, M. Posewitz, and M. Seibert. Photons, photosynthesis, and high-performance computing: challenges, progress, and promise of modeling metabolism in green algae. J. Phys.: Conf. Ser., 125 012048, 2008.
• D. M. Alber and L. N. Olson. Coarsening invariance and bucket-sorted independent sets for algebraic multigrid, submitted.
• D. M. Alber, P. Graf, C. H. Chang, K. Kim, and M. Seibert. High-performance systems biology toolkit, in preparation.

Post-Doctoral Biography

Shortly after completing my Ph.D., I started a postdoctoral position in the Scientific Computing Center (now the Materials and Computational Science Center) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado.

My primary project at NREL was part of a computational systems biology project called “Green Energy: Advancing Bio-hydrogen“. Briefly, the project aims to: (1) construct a comprehensive metabolic model for the hydrogen-producing green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii; (2) produce high-performance software for solving problems arising from the rate equations encoded in the model.

In February 2009, I started a position at Microsoft in which I research topics in numerical linear algebra and other areas of scientific computing.